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Adobe Romania WebKit Hackathon

Last week, for three days, the Adobe Romanian office hosted a WebKit Hackathon. What’s all the fuss with this WebKit Hackathon you might wonder. Let me explain :D

First of all, why WebKit? I truly believe that you already know the answer. In case you don’t, here is a short anecdote: Dion Almaer (you know, the guy who started Ajaxian among many other things) once said something along these lines: if you are a student probably the best time investment you can make today is to grab the WebKit source code and start “playing” with it. There is no dennying that WebKit is one of the most used browser engines today (I’m not talking about browser market share I’m talking about the number of different projects using this engine).

Let’s move on and talk about the hackathon. A hackathon gives developers a chance to learn or to teach about a specific technology. Because you have these two categories involved (people who want to learn new things and people who know these things and want to teach others) the energy level and enthusiasm is pretty much off the scale. This is why it is not unusual at the end of a hackathon to realize you’ve gotten more work done than what you had expected.

The last question you might have is why Adobe Romania? Because we have engineers who have been working on the WebKit codebase for the past 4-5 years. From their work prototypes of CSS Regions, CSS Exclusions, and CSS Shaders – to name just a few – emerged.

Thus, if you put these three ingredients together you get the first Romanian WebKit Hackathon. So what exactly happened there?

A number of Adobe WebKit engineers together with seven students worked on the WebKit codebase. It is interesting to note that the students didn’t have any prior experience with WebKit. The result was amazing. Some of their work was accepted by WebKit reviewers and it will be committed back to the WebKit trunk. Here are some examples of the work they did:

Fixed elements that use rounded corners and background images so the image will be clipped.

My colleagues are working on getting the demos out. I will update this post with the links once they are published. Until the next Adobe Romania WebKit Hackathon, all the best and, of course, congrats to all people involved in this event!